Ashes to Ashes
by stickler
Summary: What Hell means to me. Includes death and what some people may interpret as sex.


This was "inspired" by taggirl's attempt to portray the inner workings of atheism, but it's been rolling around in my head for a long time. I rarely write poetry these days, anyway, but, well, I guess I did. 

Knowledge.

The sweet sticky bite of original sin, 

the blinding flash of intuition, 

the realization that I am alone again.

Professors for parents–

We read Shakespeare out loud before bed 

and could recite the periodic table like the alphabet.

Building our medieval cities out of wooden blocks

Gods to the imaginary lives we had fashioned

And leaving them heaped in piles when we were called to dinner.

Wren.

Our little sister.

The baby born when we were older,

the unexpected visitor,

an everyday miracle of tiny feet and fingers

our grandmother's eyes no longer clouded with cataracts

but clear and bright in a new face.

Wren (not really; this was the name you gave her and I kept.

Our parents were no longer hippies; she was Miranda.

"Oh, brave new world, that has such people in't!" Miranda

Daddy's little girl Miranda).

Everything in the world you had done first

Grown taller

Run faster

Taught me chess, a battlefield reduced to optics and geometry 

(is this how God would view the world?)

Until you did what I still have not

And found the first tumors.

They say that I do not believe in hell.

This is wrong

for I administered injections of chemotherapy.

I slept on the plastic chairs of waiting rooms

inhaling the smell of air both sterile and diseased.

Hell abides among us.

In our daily failures

In our broken promises

In everything you left behind

Six million children under five

Dead of hunger this and every year.

Somewhere in America, in the time I type these words,

a woman has been sexually assaulted. 

Two minutes. Two.

7, 530 documented hate crimes in 2000. 

Perhaps counting a third of the total.

"Hell is other people," Sartre said

(not for nothing am I the son of intellectuals)

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell,"

said Morley and Huxley both.

" Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love," quoth Doestoevsky. 

I am insulted by cartoon figures of flames and darkness.

My inner physicist rolls his eyes.

Heaven is hotter than Hell in the proof written twenty years ago

in painstaking nods to biblical science.

This, of course, says very little about anything

except perhaps, the gruesome pleasure taken in such descriptions

horror movies with a twist of self-righteousness.

Backfired, perhaps, for the buzzing fluorescent lights

and the sterile disinfected grayness of the cancer ward

chill me sevenfold more than such clichés.

The last few nights they let me sleep in your bed

the way I had when I was four and afraid of thunderstorms.

I wanted to shield you with my body

Negotiate.

"Take me instead!

He is kinder, wiser, gentler

A better person in every way,

I will go

To heaven or hell or dissolution."

But there was no one there.

Nothing besides the inexorable power 

Of a body turned inward against itself.

No angels like the orientation committee at the college

Returning students, with their glowing smiles and matching t-shirts

To bob as buoys above the waves of chaos.

Nor demons, either, I hope

Shadows of nothingness to taunt our fear

The not-knowing of a year.

We were unlucky

Or unchosen

Unblessed

Unworthy

Only words

No prayers at your funeral

We read instead your favorite books and poems

Wren read the Mad Hatter scene from _Alice in Wonderland_

Mom read from Darwin

who had also loved and lost a child.

I think back to Cain and Abel

And wonder who I am.

I'd like to think

That in the face (or non-face)

Of a bloodthirsty God

I could lay down my offerings

And walk away.

Injustice is not only so when it happens to you.

Eternity is a lie, and the notion that our time here is indifferent more so.

A mustard seed of truth perhaps, and yet a lie.

For pure time is nothing we understand

not even Einstein's heirs,

and what we have is the sand of an earthly hourglass

running through our fingers.

I was not prepared for yours to fall to dust so soon.

Perhaps God created man in His own image

A statement packed with a Mobius strip of double meanings

For what kind of God could we reflect?

And perhaps we returned the favor and made Him in our own,

Our weakness and pettiness and thirst for revenge.

Perhaps.

But you!

You were more than my image

Physical, tangible

Skinned knees and freckles

My ears and knuckles on another body

History and road map in one.

From you I was meant to learn to be a man.

Now I am older than you were the day you died

(and as weary of euphemism)

and I have moved past.

You had only just once kissed a girl

Giddy and giggling in a June twilight

I have done this and more.

I know the shape of my girlfriend's breasts and hipbones in the dark.

Have watched her sleep

Have let her see me weep

Have made promises to keep.

Her God is one I could respect,

Although sometimes I fear it is too late.

You see, in witnessing to me 

You are not sacred.

They _know_ you are in Hell.

You, who found Christianity a dangerous and corrupt silhouette of a good idea

Poisoned by hypocrisy

Love thy enemy and drop thy bombs

Spread the Gospel in the brave new world with smallpox and syphillis.

You who could not conceive of your humanity as something for which you ought to beg forgiveness.

You who would not degrade yourself to worship fear even as death crept across the pillow.

And I, who cling to my wooden building blocks

Of truth, fair play and academic honesty,

Am made fearful by that surety

I have woken up from nightmares of your suffering renewed forever.

I who play at theory, looking at the world this way and that,

The way Wren flies across the stage in a _tour jeté_

And still always revising, refining, remembering

cannot accept a one and only

And even if I could, would never celebrate it.

In the Old Testament God said

"I am a jealous God and you shall have no other gods before me."

Jealous? Why so? 

Never enough

The kingdom and the power and the glory forever are not enough

He needs a place of eternal suffering to loom over and gloat

The carrot and the stick

The gun to my head.

The doctor shaking his.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely

So much for an omnipotent God!

In the Bhagavad Gita, God said

"Call me by whatever name you like; worship me however you like; it all goes to the supreme reality."

It is like knowing silence and noise

Silence, the absence of noise

Silence which allows noise

Silence is noise.

"Why can't you understand?"

Shrill and demanding

Decisive and deceitful

For even what I understand

I do not accept.

It is not belief I chide

Only the viciousness inherent inside

To claim a truth untested and untried

To claim my heart and never walk inside.

To damn my brother with their smiles.

And if I were to ask a question back, it would be 

no more and less than the far-flung thoughts I see:

How can Heaven exist, if Hell there be?

And if it does, can you not try to understand?

I cannot cross barbed wire into such a land

I cannot leave my loved ones

will not as such a traitor dwell.

I curse the two-faced heavens

if my brother burns in hell.

I am my brother's keeper.

Here, there and everywhere.

If there is hell, I will join him head held high

Rather than to join in the making of the lie

that love could such a place devise

that knowledge and this God can find no room for compromise.

_________

__

"You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God." ––John Murray

This is my fumbling, meandering attempt at explaining my particular stance regarding traditional, fundamentalist Christianity, and yes, it hinges on the doctrine of Hell. I make no bones about the fact that this is emotive and personal. In fact, I emphasize this. This is not "the atheist creed." We are not one; we are not interchangeable; we are not the fodder of inversion. This is about me. Please do not attempt to make any broader generalizations from it. 

Because I would prefer not to have to read reviews speculating this particular point later, I will now acknowledge that this is not a parable. The narrative within in the poem is true. 

If you wish to contact me, be advised that I am not using my main e-mail address on this board because I in the past I have been "stalked" so to speak through an Internet exchange dealing with this very topic. If you e-mail me at the address given, please leave a review to tell me so that I can check and respond in a timely manner. 


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